Wrapping it up

I love wrapping presents.  This past week our dining room table was full of wrapping paper, tape, boxes, bows, and tags.    I have a lot of fancy sparkly gift tags I usually use but this year I was feeling extra inspired and decided to do things a little differently.

I broke out my Cricut die-cut machine and some colored cardstock to make some letters of various sizes.   I then used a black ink pad to distress the sides of the letters.  This was a bit difficult for letters like S that had a ton of curves.  I started out using the inkpad directly on the letter cutouts but it was hard to get everything and it was a bit messy.  After googling how to distress corners, I picked up a tool which had a felt pad I inked and then used on the paper.  This produced a softer, more speckled effect and allowed me to get in all the nooks and crannies of whatever letter I had printed.  Both ways have their advantages so I did a little of each and some letters had both techniques.

I then hole punched the letters and attached the first letter of a person’s name to a gift instead of using a tag.  I love the way they turned out! Here’s a couple of my favorites.

Unfortunately too many of Mr. C’s family members have names that start with the same letters so I had to write their name on the back of the letters to avoid confusion.  Next year I’m hoping to get really fancy schmancy by making my own bows from ribbon, but I’m very happy with my name tag upgrades this year!